March of the Two Inch Squares

 I don't think I've actually spelled it out, but for at least the beginning of 2023, I'm concentrating on one main task per month. That doesn't mean I'll actually finish that task in that month, nor that I'll only be working on one thing. It just means my focus will be on one thing. 

For January, my focus was making the memory projects. I had hoped to finish in January, but it actually took until mid-February to finish and I'm OK with that.

February was two fold, get some quilt tops made from existing blocks, and work on tidying my sewing area. I showed pics of my tidying progress last week, and I've showed some of the quilt tops I finished. Here are some more

This is now a completed quilt top...

...and so it this.

I got the two borders on this quilt that had been hanging around my fabric room way too long.

The Ruby Jubilee mystery that I made from men's shirts is now a quilt top too! 

I got as far as I could on this green/cream scrap quilt. I plan on adding a green string border, but I've decided June is String Piecing month.

I wanted to feel like I got something actually finished, so I made up four pillow shams for DH to use as giveaways. What? You say there's only three on the photo? That's because DH already took one of them to his office! It was another with the four scooters on it.

It's March now! I just finished the February column of my temperature quilt, and there's nothing like seeing time go by like making one quilt unit per day and watching the project grow.

For March, my focus is sewing up 2" squares. These are 2" cut squares, so they'll finish at 1.5" in a quilt. I have a LOT of 2" squares. When my 2" strip drawer was overflowing, and I started sewing it down, as I was cutting projects for that, if I only had a bit of fabric left, I cut it into squares. I busted almost all of my 2" strips, they now fit in a container smaller than a shoebox, but my squares? Well, they are out of hand and it's time to fix that. 

A few months ago I started making 16 patches from 2" squares, and I've got a big pile of those done, and more matched up ready to sew. I've been using those as my leader/ender projects. Now that I'm making 2" squares my focus, I'll be using all the 3.5" strips I cut up as my leader/enders, and some of those units will end up paired with units I make from my 2" squares.

I find when busting scraps, starting out by looking at what I have a lot of a good place to start. After all, if I only have one square of a fabric, it's going to be used in a very scrappy project. If  have a lot of one fabric, I can make it a focus, or a lot of one color, I can do color controlled. As I was sorting my 2" squares, I realized some of the fabrics I had cut a lot of squares from. I put the ones I had a lot of the same together, then matched them in pairs. After counting a few stacks, I decided I could probably make a quilt using 64 patches. 

This week I started sewing those 64 patches.

I have all the squares set aside to make thirty 64 patches. That's 1,920 squares accounted for. You'd think that would make a dent, wouldn't you?

I still have all of these 2" squares, which are partially divided into projects.

And as if that weren't enough...

I also have all of these. I'm not showing the squares I've already used in blocks, or the ones set aside for the 64 patches. Suffice it to say, I have THOUSANDS of 2" squares! 

March may have 31 days, but I can tell you now, there is no way I can get all these squares sewn up in March. What can I do? Sew them down, get them into larger units so I can make quilts out of them. Even if I only sew up half of them, that's a LOT of squares into blocks. Some of these, I hope to assemble into quilts right away, others, I'm OK with a stack of quilt blocks. At least if I drop a stack of quilt blocks it's easy to pick up, if I drop one of these bins of squares??? Yeah, let's try to avoid that. 

Anyone have anything they want to tackle this month? Maybe you don't have a zillion 2" squares like I do, but hey, if you want to join me in challenging yourself to sew something up that's bugging you, let me know!